LibGuides: Theatre Research Guide: Books & Primary Texts

Primary Source Databases Research Guide

This research guide has many of the databases listed below along with many others organized by topic or research interest.

Primary Source Databases Research Guide
by Jim Shaw Last Updated Oct 24, 2024 2829 views this year

Gale: Primary Sources This link opens in a new window
Gale Primary Sources brings the thoughts, words, and actions of past centuries into the present for a comprehensive research experience. The platform has been thoughtfully designed to help students and researchers examine literary, political, and social culture of the last 500 years. The University of Nebraska's account includes access to 40 primary source databases.
History Vault This link opens in a new window
Researchers can access primary source material including letters, papers, photographs, scrapbooks, financial records, diaries, and many more. The materials are taken from the University Publications of America (UPA) Collections.
Early English Books Online This link opens in a new window
Contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700 - from the first book printed in English by William Caxton, through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the tumult of the English Civil War.
English Short Title Catalog - ESTC This link opens in a new window
Free database that identifies titles published prior to 1801 in Great Britain, North America and other British colonies, as well as books published anywhere in English.

Hathi Trust Digital Library
Over 850,000 volumes in public domain! Most of the volumes are full-text, however, there are some that are only searchable and lack full-text.
ArchiveGrid
While the other resources in this list will take you to digitized material, ArchiveGrid gives researchers access to finding aids for collections. "ArchiveGrid is a collection of over three million archival material descriptions, including MARC records from WorldCat and finding aids harvested from the web. It's supported by OCLC Research as the basis for our experimentation and testing in text mining, data analysis, and discovery system applications and interfaces. Archival collections held by thousands of libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives are represented in ArchiveGrid."

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Enter search words to search by keyword. By default the bar on this guide searches "Library Catalog". This will return items at UNO Libraries. You can also search “Everything," "Articles," "Network Catalog" which will search all the library in the University of Nebraska System, or “Course Reserves.”
Click on "Advanced Search" to search by subject, title, or author fields. "Advanced Search" gives you many options to limit your search—by material type, date, language, etc. Or, you can filter your results after searching.

Use the filters on the left-hand side of the screen to limit your results by date ,resource type, location, language, and more.

eBooks Help
The e-Books guide contains all the information you need about using and downloading the library's e-book collections.